After 5 years in the market, PUBG rebranded in 2022 and switched to a free-to-play model. But is it worth starting with PUBG Battlegrounds now? MeinMMO tells you more.
Since 2017, PUBG has been a shooter phenomenon. Now, at the start of 2022, it is also free-to-play under the name PUBG Battlegrounds. It has been a long journey to get to this point.
On Steam, it set player number records one after another. PUBG was also a gigantic success and great fun for streamers and viewers alike on Twitch.
But top streamers have long since stopped playing PUBG. The competition in the gaming market has also grown significantly. Games like Fortnite, CoD Warzone, and Apex Legends have evolved the genre and appeal to a wide audience.
So is it still worth starting with PUBG in 2022? And what can newcomers expect from the game? We will answer these questions in detail.
What is PUBG Battlegrounds?
This is how the gameplay works: PUBG Battlegrounds is a shooter that belongs to the sub-genre of so-called “Battle Royale.” Anyone who has seen the “Hunger Games” movies or read the books is already familiar with the concept.
Up to 100 players compete in a match in PUBG on one of currently 8 massive maps. You can play a match solo, or in teams of 2 or 4 players.
The start of a round is in an airplane that flies across the map. You can choose when to jump out of the plane and where to land with your parachute. During this, you are always unarmed.
Once you reach the ground, you should find loot as quickly as possible. Weapons, ammunition, armor, and healing items are your top priority. Because in PUBG, it’s all about survival.
The last team or the last surviving solo player wins the match. To prevent you from just hiding in a building and never being found, the playable area of the map steadily shrinks as the round progresses. The remaining playable zone is ‘eaten’ away by a blue ring that inflicts damage if you stay within it.
How much content does PUBG offer? Since the release of PUBG, the game has received a lot of additional content. Some cosmetic skins (even unusual ones like bear outfits and dinosaur costumes) have been added, as well as features known from other games like a ping system. But the maps, either newly added or completely overhauled since release, are particularly important for the gameplay.
The 8 maps play drastically differently – thanks to different layouts, vehicles, and even their own mechanics. For instance, if you want a respawn mechanic like in other Battle Royales, you will find that only on the map Taego. In the past, players could choose which map to play on. However, this feature is not available at the time of this article’s release.
The following content is currently in PUBG:
- 44 firearms
- 8 maps
- 16 drivable vehicles
- Multiple game modes
- Battle Royale (playable in either first-person or third-person perspective)
- A comprehensive training mode
- Team Deathmatch
- Ranked and custom matches (access with Battlegrounds Plus DLC)
PUBG plays significantly slower than the competition – for better or worse
How does PUBG play in 2022? PUBG may not have crafting or similar mechanics, but it essentially plays like a kind of survival shooter. How many kills you have by the end of a round is irrelevant. What counts is to be the last one alive.
Weapons sound almost like their real-life counterparts, and footsteps are so loud that you can decide through your headset alone whether it’s worth entering the next building. This makes positioning, waiting for your moment, and patiently aiming and shooting important in PUBG – after all, you can be easily located as well.
The weapons are hard to control and extremely loud. With each shot, you can almost feel the enormous power in your virtual hands. You also get to experience how difficult it is to rein in such firepower.
The shots echo through the forests, deserts, and snowy landscapes of the maps – so loud that you feel like every player has heard you and knows exactly where you are. This makes the gigantic maps feel claustrophobically small with just a quick click of the mouse.
Compared to games like Apex Legends or CoD Warzone, which reward aggressive gameplay in their own way, PUBG can thus appear almost lethargically slow. Conversely, the tension is significantly higher, especially towards the end of a round.
In the final ring, you are highly concentrated, paying attention to every little sound and trying to be quieter than a church mouse. Your heart is pumping, your hand on the mouse is shaking, as a false movement or distraction means your end. Those who successfully master these situations are rewarded with an indescribable feeling of ecstasy, relief, and superiority.
PUBG opens up to a broader audience in 2022
What influence has PUBG had since release? PUBG was not the first battle royale on the market, but it made the genre what it is today.
This is also due to an incredibly strong success in the game’s first year: To this day, more Steam players have never played a game simultaneously than PUBG in January 2018. Over 3.2 million players were on the battle royale servers at the same time (via SteamCharts).
The massive success of PUBG has inspired other developers and publishers to try their hand at the genre.
Activision initially tried with the Blackout mode in CoD Black Ops 4, then later successfully with CoD Warzone. EA initially failed with a battle royale in Battlefield 5, but then celebrated massive success with Apex Legends. And Fortnite completely reinvented itself, becoming a pop culture phenomenon only after changing from a survival co-op shooter to a battle royale.
Where does PUBG stand in 2022? In January 2022, PUBG changed its payment model. Instead of costing almost €30 for 5 years, it is now free-to-play. This brings it on par with the competition, as Fortnite, Apex Legends, and CoD Warzone have all been free-to-play battle royales from the start.
The game now primarily finances itself with purchasable skins. New players must also pay for access to ranked and custom matches – which they can access via the ‘Battlegrounds Plus’ pass, costing €12.99.
With this shift to F2P, PUBG opens itself up to a broader audience in 2022 – at least regarding accessibility to the game itself. The gameplay remains largely the same as it was in 2017 when it was one of the first attempts at the genre. Thus, new players are discovering many corners and edges that may appear hopelessly outdated and clunky today.
Because PUBG’s competition has significantly modernized the genre over the years. They are more colorful, faster, and beginner-friendly. The new battle royales have more personality and more content. These various approaches have also made battle royales more appealing to more people, and PUBG painfully lacks some of these aspects.
On the other hand, hardly any other game offers the level of realism that PUBG provides. Especially the gunplay benefits from the ‘quirky’ weapons that players have to learn to master. Those who succeed are rewarded with an unparalleled feeling of invincibility and exceptional skill.
The positives of PUBG:
- The gunplay can be immensely rewarding. This is due to the combination of the complexity of the weapons, the high learning curve associated with their use, and a short time-to-kill (TTK). Players who master the weapons are rewarded with satisfying kills.
- Realistic mechanics give the game finesse and depth. For example, players must be cautious not to hold the weapon too close to a wall. Otherwise, they may not shoot out of a window due to the wall being in the way.
- The sound design is outstanding. With some experience, players can accurately gauge the direction from which sounds are coming and how far away they are. This allows for highly strategic gameplay – conversely, slow and cautious gameplay is rewarded as well.
- Since 2017, PUBG has been fed with new content. Therefore, the game currently offers significantly more content than many latecomers in the genre.
The negatives of PUBG:
- The complexity and short TTK can make the entry frustrating and mercilessly difficult.
- The gameplay strongly rewards slow and cautious approaches. This can be extremely tedious and drawn-out for solo players.
- PUBG feels comparatively ‘lifeless.’ Aside from gunfire sounds, there is almost no other sound throughout the game. Personalities like those in Apex Legends, who talk to each other, are absent here. There is also no voice in your ear like in Warzone that announces game situations such as the shrinking zone.
- PUBG largely lacks a respawn mechanic. So, if you die in a match, you remain dead for the entire game. The only exception is the map Taego: Here, there is a mechanic reminiscent of the Gulag from Warzone.
- The loot system in PUBG is cumbersome and slow.
- Cumbersome and slow is also the movement, which does not always seem intentional.
- Cheaters are still a significant problem, and they could become even a larger issue due to the F2P model.
Conclusion on PUBG Battlegrounds in 2022
Conclusion: An outdated facade hides a solid framework
When PUBG was released, the spark didn’t ignite for me. The gameplay felt too slow, and the deaths were frustrating. I wanted to play the game faster than it allowed me to. Then when Apex Legends came along, I fell in love immediately and stopped thinking about PUBG.
At the beginning of 2022, I wanted to give PUBG another chance but didn’t have the best time. Especially with today’s perspective, PUBG appears, at first glance, lifeless, cumbersome, and hopelessly outdated. This is alienating and inaccessible for (quasi) newcomers like me. However, after forcing myself through a few boring tutorial matches and then some frustrating real matches, I had a genuine aha moment.
Suddenly, I understood how the weapons wanted to be used and how I needed to sneak through the maps. I felt like I could and wanted to keep pace with the tempo PUBG demanded. That is still not my favorite pace – I simply love fast movement and aggressive gameplay too much. But I can’t deny that PUBG offers something that all its imitators have not yet been able to replicate.
Because even though PUBG seems hopelessly old-fashioned at first glance: This game has almost single-handedly popularized a genre, remains popular to this day, and offers something that is rarely available in this form on the market. Therefore, I am glad that I no longer just see the outdated facade of the game. Now I can appreciate the solid framework on which PUBG is built – as can the entire battle royale genre.
Especially since it is now free-to-play and the barrier to entry has been lowered, I recommend giving PUBG (another) chance. You may feel the same excitement that has left such a mark to this day.
Marko Jevtic
Freelance author at MeinMMO
That 2022 is a good time to (re)join PUBG is also demonstrated by the streamers. For instance, summit1g, once one of the biggest streamers of the game, returned after years. He had fun right away:
Huge Twitch streamer plays PUBG again after years: „I believe in the game again”
This feeling of paranoia is not unfounded. It’s likely that while hunting for a kill, the loud gunfire makes you the hunted. Therefore, slow, careful, and patient gameplay should be the order of the day – unless your team communicates exceptionally well and plays at the absolute skill limit.
What makes PUBG special in 2022? Unlike most other shooters, PUBG places great importance on a high degree of detailed realism. This is most noticeable with the weapons.
Each shot in PUBG is more complex than many other games in their entirety. This is due to many weapon mechanics you need to consider:
- Each weapon has its own type of ammunition that you need to know. If you pack the wrong ammunition, you will face a problem in battle and have no room for looting. Having the necessary knowledge here saves you from many stupid deaths.
- Weapons must be reloaded after picking them up before you can use them. Thus, you won’t immediately jump into action after landing, but must first quickly and thoughtfully retreat.
- Especially fully automatic weapons have barely controllable recoil. Therefore, you often have to fire well-considered bursts or set your firing mode to single-shot. Otherwise, all your bullets will end up in the clouds. Your attack quickly becomes a much too aggressive warning shot.
- Shooting while moving is extremely imprecise. The already hard-to-control weapons hit nothing but the graphically outdated horizon when you try evasive maneuvers. Therefore, it’s important that you have a dominant position before the battle from which you can also retreat to heal and reload.
- Bullets are comparatively slow projectiles that are also affected by gravity. To hit your targets, you must learn to correctly adjust the scopes for distance and read the distance markings in the scopes accurately.
- Walls can obstruct your weapon. Especially when you want to shoot out of a window, this can quickly become a problem. The larger the weapon, the more carefully you must position yourself in front of a window.
All these realistic nuances make the game unique among battle royales, but also particularly complex and difficult to learn. PUBG punishes a false step or a hasty shot quickly with a deadly headshot for you. This is something you should avoid, especially in the battle royale format, as you will then have to line up for the next match again.
Compared to games like Apex Legends or CoD Warzone, which reward aggressive gameplay in their own way, PUBG can thus appear almost lethargically slow. Conversely, the tension is significantly higher, especially towards the end of a round.
In the final ring, you are highly concentrated, paying attention to every little sound and trying to be quieter than a church mouse. Your heart is pumping, your hand on the mouse is shaking, as a false movement or distraction means your end. Those who successfully master these situations are rewarded with an indescribable feeling of ecstasy, relief, and superiority.
PUBG opens up to a broader audience in 2022
What influence has PUBG had since release? PUBG was not the first battle royale on the market, but it made the genre what it is today.
This is also due to an incredibly strong success in the game’s first year: To this day, more Steam players have never played a game simultaneously than PUBG in January 2018. Over 3.2 million players were on the battle royale servers at the same time (via SteamCharts).
The massive success of PUBG has inspired other developers and publishers to try their hand at the genre.
Activision initially tried with the Blackout mode in CoD Black Ops 4, then later successfully with CoD Warzone. EA initially failed with a battle royale in Battlefield 5, but then celebrated massive success with Apex Legends. And Fortnite completely reinvented itself, becoming a pop culture phenomenon only after changing from a survival co-op shooter to a battle royale.
Where does PUBG stand in 2022? In January 2022, PUBG changed its payment model. Instead of costing almost €30 for 5 years, it is now free-to-play. This brings it on par with the competition, as Fortnite, Apex Legends, and CoD Warzone have all been free-to-play battle royales from the start.
The game now primarily finances itself with purchasable skins. New players must also pay for access to ranked and custom matches – which they can access via the ‘Battlegrounds Plus’ pass, costing €12.99.
With this shift to F2P, PUBG opens itself up to a broader audience in 2022 – at least regarding accessibility to the game itself. The gameplay remains largely the same as it was in 2017 when it was one of the first attempts at the genre. Thus, new players are discovering many corners and edges that may appear hopelessly outdated and clunky today.
Because PUBG’s competition has significantly modernized the genre over the years. They are more colorful, faster, and beginner-friendly. The new battle royales have more personality and more content. These various approaches have also made battle royales more appealing to more people, and PUBG painfully lacks some of these aspects.
On the other hand, hardly any other game offers the level of realism that PUBG provides. Especially the gunplay benefits from the ‘quirky’ weapons that players have to learn to master. Those who succeed are rewarded with an unparalleled feeling of invincibility and exceptional skill.
The positives of PUBG:
- The gunplay can be immensely rewarding. This is due to the combination of the complexity of the weapons, the high learning curve associated with their use, and a short time-to-kill (TTK). Players who master the weapons are rewarded with satisfying kills.
- Realistic mechanics give the game finesse and depth. For example, players must be cautious not to hold the weapon too close to a wall. Otherwise, they may not shoot out of a window due to the wall being in the way.
- The sound design is outstanding. With some experience, players can accurately gauge the direction from which sounds are coming and how far away they are. This allows for highly strategic gameplay – conversely, slow and cautious gameplay is rewarded as well.
- Since 2017, PUBG has been fed with new content. Therefore, the game currently offers significantly more content than many latecomers in the genre.
The negatives of PUBG:
- The complexity and short TTK can make the entry frustrating and mercilessly difficult.
- The gameplay strongly rewards slow and cautious approaches. This can be extremely tedious and drawn-out for solo players.
- PUBG feels comparatively ‘lifeless.’ Aside from gunfire sounds, there is almost no other sound throughout the game. Personalities like those in Apex Legends, who talk to each other, are absent here. There is also no voice in your ear like in Warzone that announces game situations such as the shrinking zone.
- PUBG largely lacks a respawn mechanic. So, if you die in a match, you remain dead for the entire game. The only exception is the map Taego: Here, there is a mechanic reminiscent of the Gulag from Warzone.
- The loot system in PUBG is cumbersome and slow.
- Cumbersome and slow is also the movement, which does not always seem intentional.
- Cheaters are still a significant problem, and they could become even a larger issue due to the F2P model.
Conclusion on PUBG Battlegrounds in 2022
Conclusion: An outdated facade hides a solid framework
When PUBG was released, the spark didn’t ignite for me. The gameplay felt too slow, and the deaths were frustrating. I wanted to play the game faster than it allowed me to. Then when Apex Legends came along, I fell in love immediately and stopped thinking about PUBG.
At the beginning of 2022, I wanted to give PUBG another chance but didn’t have the best time. Especially with today’s perspective, PUBG appears, at first glance, lifeless, cumbersome, and hopelessly outdated. This is alienating and inaccessible for (quasi) newcomers like me. However, after forcing myself through a few boring tutorial matches and then some frustrating real matches, I had a genuine aha moment.
Suddenly, I understood how the weapons wanted to be used and how I needed to sneak through the maps. I felt like I could and wanted to keep pace with the tempo PUBG demanded. That is still not my favorite pace – I simply love fast movement and aggressive gameplay too much. But I can’t deny that PUBG offers something that all its imitators have not yet been able to replicate.
Because even though PUBG seems hopelessly old-fashioned at first glance: This game has almost single-handedly popularized a genre, remains popular to this day, and offers something that is rarely available in this form on the market. Therefore, I am glad that I no longer just see the outdated facade of the game. Now I can appreciate the solid framework on which PUBG is built – as can the entire battle royale genre.
Especially since it is now free-to-play and the barrier to entry has been lowered, I recommend giving PUBG (another) chance. You may feel the same excitement that has left such a mark to this day.
Marko Jevtic
Freelance author at MeinMMO
That 2022 is a good time to (re)join PUBG is also demonstrated by the streamers. For instance, summit1g, once one of the biggest streamers of the game, returned after years. He had fun right away:
Huge Twitch streamer plays PUBG again after years: „I believe in the game again”
